Category Archives: Essay

“The heart is a fragile organ.”

Essay

The heart is a funny thing: it is an essential organ, like the brain, or your liver, or your kidneys. But it holds a different kind of memory within it. It is the one organ in the human body that can be damaged emotionally, and such damage can make you feel like you’re dying, as if you were in cardiac arrest. The manifestation may come in the form of a panic attack: the memory of someone beloved will register in the brain, as if you’re viewing a Polaroid in your psyche.

Then the memory travels down into the heart, searing in its delivery as it journeys through all your vessels and then passes through the valves of the heart. Such memories are insidious; they burrow their way into every nook and cranny and once positioned and situated, they hold fast and don’t let go. Unless, of course, a more wonderful memory comes along, dislodging the old one from its far too comfortable position…

You see, the heart is a fragile organ. The memories we hold inside it – including all the terrible, lasting memories that knock the wind out of us and make you wish you could dig your own grave and lie in it, waiting for someone to pour the soil on the top of your head – are never fully erased. They just fade in intensity over time. And that’s the most important thing to remember about the heart: even if you’re feeling horribly bad in the moment – like all is hopeless and you have no idea how you’re even going to get out of bed, let alone cope with the emotional fallout – you will find that as time passes, the memories of your heart won’t haunt you as much as they did when the pain was still fresh. The memories still exist, but they become distant, like whispers from another life.

We get angry with ourselves, because we are so insistent that had we seen the warning signs, we would have never allowed our hearts to get broken. We think we’ve said or done something to deserve the pain. We beat ourselves up. We go through stages of disappointment, sadness, anger, self-loathing, self-harm. At times, destruction seems an easier path than rebuilding.

But the pain is necessary experience. And when our hearts are let go from one person, then we are free to love another. And you want someone who loves you for you.

Love is the most beautiful thing we as human beings can experience. Never, ever lose your faith in love.

Are lazy reviewers enabling bad songwriters?

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“To be a mouthpiece of any kind in these content-saturated times is an enviable and increasingly rare position, and with this privilege ought come certain responsibilities: An artist’s lyrics should honor the reciprocal contract between artist and listener; they should aim to seduce, puzzle, bewitch or provoke something in us that reflects our shared human experience. They should say something to us about our lives. But we as listeners and critics must fulfill our end of this bargain, and hold our favorite artists accountable for what they say — and more importantly, what they do not.”

…so writeth Stereogum contributing editor James Toth in an opinion piece this past Monday afternoon called “That’s A Bad Lyric And You Know It”. The article has created quite a bit of a stir among music appreciators on the NPR Web site. Those in agreement with Toth cite the general inanity of lyrics of current pop music as a sad signal of the decline of the art of this industry, while those against his arguments label him as “pretentious”, with one even attacking his style of writing while admitting he “only managed to wade halfway through this fuster cluck of mental diarrhea” rather than give him the benefit of the doubt by reading the whole article. (Ummm…)

Personally, I thought it said what needed to be said, and he gave plenty of good examples to support his arguments. A couple years ago, I went to Boston on holiday and happened to see Best Coast in Cambridge at a place called the Middle East. (Toth uses the songwriting of Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino as an example of lyrical inanity in his piece.) I was really there to see support act Male Bonding, who represented one of the worst support / headline mismatches I’ve had the “pleasure” to witness: Male Bonding is a punk band from London, while Best Coast tries to do sunny Beach Boys-esque surf pop. Best Coast enjoys massive popularity both here in America and in Britain, and honestly, I wanted to see what the fuss was about.

I think about two or three songs in, I had no greater desire than to take a fork and poke my eyes out so I could be put me out of my misery. What the hell were we listening to? Yet, as I looked around the room from my vantage point at the bar where I had decamped to earlier (if you were wondering, I’d been hit in the head several times during the Male Bonding set by a kid who attempted to crowd surf, the soles of his trainers having hit the side of my head one too many times), everyone was smiling, gently bopping their heads from side to side, looking like they were in heaven. I, on the other hand, was bored to tears. What was I missing? Why couldn’t I enjoy myself? Did I have to be a Jack Johnson loving, surfing meathead to relate?

I realise I’m a word snob. I can’t help it. I’ve always been a writer and had the mind of a writer, for as long as I can remember, even as a child. At the same time, I recognise there is plenty of music I love and cherish that isn’t terribly intelligent lyric-wise. Take, for example, Friendly Fires‘ ‘On Board’, whose baseline alone makes my heart sing. Don’t get me wrong, I think everyone has music that speaks to them and their emotions, and we need music – and different music – for our different moods and different stages of our lives, and some of that might not require you to pull out a dictionary or sit down like Rodin’s Thinker and really ponder the meaning of life. And that’s a good thing. Music should move you, however it manages to do exactly that. What Toth’s article does very well, though it requires you to read through the whole thing and get to the last paragraph (whoa, what a concept!), is passionately reveal that it is the fault of the current state of music reviewing that has led to this “dumbing down” of lyrical content.

As I’ve “grown up” as a music reviewer, from my humble beginnings at the now-defunct PopWreckoning, through to my work on This is Fake DIY and editorship at TGTF, I’ve definitely noticed a change in the way I approach music reviews. When I became Editor at TGTF, I decided that there needed to be minimum word count for single reviews (at least 200 words) and album reviews (at least 300). Part of the reason for this was my own frustration reading those reviews in music magazines that practically require you to break out a magnifying glass. How anyone can distill the meaning, scope, and quality of an album that generally lasts over 30 minutes long in a couple of sentences is beyond me. I recognise that our Web site’s reviews are a hell lot longer than those on other Web sites and in magazines, and I am fine with that: I’d rather us do a better, comprehensive job on describing someone’s baby – in positive, neutral, or negative light – than gloss over the culmination of weeks / months / years of hard work by an artist.

As we’ve never instituted a word limit on TGTF, I noticed my own reviews were getting ridiculous in length, even the single reviews: the first really long one I did was in February 2011, for Dutch Uncles‘ ‘Face-In’, and I remember after writing it, I was internally apologising to the readers of TGTF who didn’t care for my lyric analysis and just wanted to know what it sounded like, and was it any good? But Toth’s article this week gave me further support for what I’ve already been doing for a while now, both here on Music in Notes and on TGTF. Lyrics do matter. And judging from the interaction I’ve had with Dutch Uncles’ lyricist and my friend Duncan Wallis on this very single and with other songwriters, my viewpoint is appreciated, because there are a lot of sites and publications that just don’t bother.

Why? They’re too preoccupied with what “sounds good.” (See paragraph 3 on this page.) I guess for them, they don’t think lyrics are an important part of the “sounding good” argument? I agree with Toth’s thesis statement that if bad lyrics are rewarded by music reviewers – especially as a result of their importance being glossed over and/or minimised, for whatever reason – there is no reason for any songwriter, except for his/her own satisfaction and self-worth as a writer, to aspire to be a good lyricist.

What is really happening at these publications and music Web sites? Is it sheer laziness? Are they are targeting the audience who doesn’t care a lick about the lyrics, and that audience far drowns out the ones of us who actually care about the words? Or do reviewers not have the background, let alone the desire, to want to do the proper research or indeed, the real nitty-gritty thinking that’s required to do a proper analysis? Probably a combination of all three. It’s a sad state of affairs, but I don’t really have a solution.

At the Great Escape festival and convention in 2012, I attended a panel that included music editors and writers from such storied publications as Q and The Sunday Times. I raised my hand and asked them what they thought about the length of reviews being shortened both online and in print and if they thought the shortening was being driven by the perceived audience’s desire for more instant gratification and readers’ lack of attention span, and if so, what were they doing to combat it. I didn’t really get a straight answer from any of them; I do recall one of them saying that I was doing no favours maligning their readers.

That wasn’t my point. I wanted to know what they thought about this travesty of the written word being truncated, seemingly everywhere, because in my mind, that was contributing to the less than useful reviews you see in most publications these days. I will read others’ reviews, surely, but I don’t put too much stock in them, seeking out the album or single in question so I can listen to it myself to come to my own conclusions instead of relying on a paltry paragraph from someone else to really tell me what I need to know about it. And if the impression that the sound of a song is far and away more important than the lyrics in it, then it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out it’s any discussion of the lyrics that will be cut and/or not even bothered with so the review fits in the confines of a template.

A final thought to leave you with. What I want to know from these people who call Toth “pretentious”, did they dare say to their teachers, “hey, you know that Grapes of Wrath door stopper you forced us to read? Now that’s what I call pretentious!”

Threatened with closure, are lyrics sites a blessing or a curse?

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“Out of a simple lyric forum an extraordinary pursuit of knowledge and depth of meaning is taking form.”

Last Friday on NME.com, deputy editor Lucy Jones wrote this blog post entitled, “The Questionable World Of Lyric Sites – Are They About To Implode?”, with an interview with Rap Genius cofounder Mahbod Moghadam. I’ve only ever used the Rap Genius site to help me decipher M.I.A.’s lyrics in an attempt to try and understand her madness. But it was very interesting to me to learn that a bunch of very high-profile rap stars, including Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent, have signed on to the project and hold verified accounts with the site, themselves using this site to interact with their fans through discussion of their lyrics.

Lyrics sites – the standard ones that literally just list the lyrics, and maybe the album where you can find the song on – in America are being threatened by closure from the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), being given 20 days to stop their “blatantly illegal behavior”. While lyrics are copyrighted in the same way songs are, I don’t see why they are so concerned about intellectual property of the lyrics themselves. The songs have already been released to the public before the lyrics for them go online, and therefore anyone with something as simple as a Tumblr could transcribe the lyrics and post them, right? I’ve done this on my own Web sites, on my Livejournal, by hand in notebooks. Would Shakespeare have thought it wrong if someone had gone to see one of his plays and brought a notepad with him, with the sole purpose of scribbling down what beautiful words he had heard? I didn’t know him personally, but I’m thinking he would have been flattered.

Songwriters write words for themselves, but they also write words to share them to the world at large. If we lose these lyrics sites, it wouldn’t be a huge deal I suppose, since the standard lyrics site doesn’t really give you anything more than someone else’s transcription from listening to the song some 10+ times, and even then, the transcription might be wrong. But I think the powers that be are missing the boat here. Contemplating the meaning of song lyrics can be as enlightening as contemplating Steinbeck, Whitman, or Tolstoy. There is a living, breathing human who wrote those lyrics, and why shouldn’t we be allowed to discuss the lyrics (and the person behind them, for that matter) as deeply as we have done in school with The Grapes of Wrath, Leaves of Grass, or Anna Karenina?